One of the city’s last independent music venues, Bottom of the Hill has survived waves of gentrification, COVID closures, and more throughout its 35 years. Now, owners say it’s last call — on their own terms.
You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.
The birthplace of San Francisco punk can’t be what it once was. Is it time to let it be something else instead?
V. Vale, the renowned punk publisher, thinks he remembers the first show he saw at Mabuhay Gardens. It was late 1976 or early 1977, and the bill featured the Nuns, one of San Francisco’s first homegrown punk bands, as well as the Dils, from San Diego. “Then they moved immediately to San Francisco,” says Vale of the latter band, “because there was nothing happening in San Diego.”
In San Francisco, something was happening: On a stage in the lower level of a Filipino restaurant in North Beach, West Coast rock ‘n’ roll was exploding into a primal new sound. “The Mabuhay was the cauldron where punk rock began in San Francisco,” says Vale, who’s in his early 80s now, though he prefers not to discuss specifics.
It was at Mabuhay — or “the Mab,” or “the Fab Mab” — that Vale began shooting photos for his seminal punk zine, Search & Destroy. (Initial printing costs were covered by $100 each from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; City Lights bookstore was just up the street.)
Nearly 50 years later, on the evening of Oct. 3, Vale will once again make the three-minute walk from his apartment on Romolo Place to a show at 435-443 Broadway. A two-story building originally constructed in 1919 as an Italian men’s club, the event space has gone by several names in its 106 years of existence, including Fame and Broadway Studios. It has also spent many of those years — especially since the original music venue closed in 1987 — shuttered and empty.
But this Friday night, hosting a reopening show headlined by San Francisco’s Kelley Stoltz, it will once again be called Mabuhay Gardens.
As first reported by KQED, a cohort of investors, event producers, and local music scene veterans launched a crowdfunding campaign in August to purchase the building. The goal: to revive both floors as a multi-use nonprofit arts and culture space under the Mabuhay name. That means the return of shows, including some of the punk varietal.
But the group intends to host other types of events, too. During SF Tech Week, from Oct. 6 through Oct. 12, the venue will become a daytime coworking hub for some of the 75,000 startup founders, AI enthusiasts, and other tech workers expected to descend on the city. That’s tough to reconcile with the Mab’s role in the public imagination — with visions of Patti Smith or Robin Williams commanding a chaotic, sweat-filled room.
The crowdfunding site’s language seems to anticipate that the multi-use plan will rankle some punk fans, and notes that Francesca Valdez, the building’s owner since 1989, had enthusiastically signed on to this direction before her death from cancer in July. The group leading the charge on reopening the venue — which includes designer-engineer Tom Watson, The Crucible co-founder Michael Sturtz, and longtime North Beach event producer Lapo Guzzini — also emphasizes the need to protect the building from condo developers, and a desire for the community’s input on programming.
“It’s not my space, it’s the community space,” Watson told KQED, pointing to a successful arts and culture hub he previously helped create in Leipzig, Germany. “These buildings tell you what they want to be.”
But so far, the loudest message coming from the venue on Broadway seems to be a question: What happens when you attempt to build something new on sacred musical ground?
If the Mab’s would-be proprietors didn’t previously understand how important the venue was to music fans, the wide range of, shall we say, pointed opinions on social media after the news broke made it clear.
Joanna Lioce, who booked the Oct. 3 show, wasn’t surprised by any of them. Lioce, who manages Vesuvio, has worked in North Beach venues for more than 20 years, and she had a pretty good sense of how the old-timers — a group that includes some of her best friends — might react.
“A lot of people were super excited. A lot of people are very cautious. A lot of people are like, ‘Eh, we'll see what happens,’” says Lioce, seated at a corner table on the second floor of Vesuvio on a recent Thursday, as the storied bar fills up with happy hour clientele. As a scene veteran, Lioce says she understands the skepticism. Music people in San Francisco have learned not to get their hopes up; they’ve been burned too many times.
Still, the fact that Lioce is even in the mix at the Mab is promising. On top of her years of experience as a booker at Bottom of the Hill and the Make Out Room, Lioce is the creative force behind Wacky Wednesdays, a free live music series that takes place twice monthly from June through October in Vesuvio-adjacent Kerouac Alley. What started in 2021 as a way to throw COVID-safer shows has morphed into a crazy-popular street party, featuring local artists, oddly great acoustics, and immaculate DIY vibes.
As for Mabuhay’s future, Lioce is cautiously optimistic. “I’m nervous, but it’s exciting,” she says. “I think it’s a great opportunity.”
Lioce has been contacting Mabuhay old-timers, like the Avengers’ Penelope Houston, photographer Ruby Ray, and artist Winston Smith (best known for Dead Kennedys album art), to make sure everyone feels like a part of the reopening. But given the blows to the independent venue landscape over the last decade, the top line for her is that any new room for live music is worth some enthusiasm and effort — especially if its shows will be affordable.
“Music is really important. I think [financially] accessible venues are important. Especially with losing Edinburgh Castle… Thee Parkside [which is under threat of closure], the Hemlock,” says Lioce, noting corporate promoters’ impact on the venue ecosystem.
“I think musicians need to get paid, but I don’t like to put on shows that are more than $20. I don’t want some insane ticketing fee. You should be able to go to a show with four of your friends on a weeknight and not have it cost more than $100.” She was clear about her stance on ticket prices upfront, she says, when she agreed to book one show per month for now. Other local bookers will organize shows of different genres.
From where Lioce is sitting, the uncertainty about what exactly will take place at the venue may actually be in line with the original club’s spirit. “I don’t think they had any idea what it was gonna be when it was, like, a restaurant that started doing shows, and then it turned into something massive,” she says.
She’s also been encouraged by the way people from different scenes have rallied around the new Mab so far.
“It’s just nice [to be reminded] that people still genuinely give a shit about culture. Everyone wants success for this, and everyone wants it to be something — maybe not exactly what it once was, because I don’t think that’s possible — but something new that people can enjoy and have a good time,” she says. “Have some fucking joy.”
San Francisco isn’t alone in the question of how to handle historically important punk venues that have long since gone under — and there aren’t many good answers. The former site of CBGB, epicenter of New York’s punk and New Wave movements, is now a John Varvatos store that sells $270 T-shirts. The Roxy in London, which opened its doors on New Year’s Day in 1977 with a barn-burner of a Clash show, spent most of the 21st century as the UK’s flagship location for Speedo.
Here in the city, there are too many formerly fantastic shuttered clubs to name. So many, in fact, that pining for them has become a sort of quintessential San Franciscan activity in and of itself. Indeed, the nostalgia around San Francisco’s musical past is so entwined with the city’s image that sometimes, it can feel difficult to see through mythology to the city’s present — to look, clear-eyed, at the current scene’s needs. It doesn’t help that our elected officials regularly exploit that sentimentality for tourism dollars. (See: a multi-week, citywide celebration of the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary with zero exploration of the conditions that once made the city fertile ground for such a scene, namely, housing that young artists could afford.)
Kelley Stoltz thought a lot about nostalgia when he first got asked to play Mabuhay’s reopening, and whether he had a right to be there.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s gonna piss off a lot of the old OG Mabuhay people,” Stoltz says with a laugh. “I’m a jangly pop rocker, you know? I’m fed up with a lot, but I wouldn’t say I’m musically exuding seriousness, anger, political diatribe, a lot of the stuff that made punk rock music so important and captivating at the time. Like, shouldn’t they have the Avengers or Tuxedomoon or something?”
Then he reflected on it. “It looms large. And I do hope they honor the place with a lot of those bands, and give them a chance to go back if they want. I hope people who used to go there get to have that moment of reflection, like, ‘I barfed here when I was 17, and here I am, and I’ve got three kids, and I'm 68, and this is cool,’” he says.
“But then I also thought, well, I’m a dude who’s doing stuff now … I think honoring a place at a certain period is really important, and then infusing it with what’s new is cool too, if it’s done the right way.”
It helped that everyone he told was thrilled — including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass organizers, when he had to back out of an emceeing gig at the festival to do the show, a scenario that does not usually thrill festival organizers. Stoltz has also mentioned the venue to folks at KEXP, where he DJs a Bay Area-focused music show, and suggested the radio station might throw events at the venue.
Stoltz has at least one OG Mabuhay person rooting for him — and for whatever the next iteration of the venue turns out to be. “We need all the clubs we can get in San Francisco,” says Vale.
Vale is aware of the plans to use the space for co-working and events in the daytime, and he isn’t averse. He’s also heard some old punk bands might play with only one original member. “Whatev,” he says with a good-natured chuckle.
If he has any advice for organizers, it’s to book shows that get people in the door. That, and he’d like to see more women-led bands. “There’s a lot more women drummers now,” he says. “That’s exciting. You never used to see that.”
But the specifics of what was happening onstage, to hear Vale tell it, were perhaps never the most important thing about Mabuhay Gardens in the first place.
“The original Mabuhay started out small, and you knew everybody. I think I met everybody at least once, knew their first names, and that’s kind of neat.” People made a home, he says, from a room full of strangers.
“So I’m hoping it will revive sort of the same way,” says Vale. “I hope people will tell their best friends, ‘Hey — you gotta come.’”
Mabuhay Gardens’ reopening party with Kelley Stoltz, White Lightning Co. and the Boars: 8pm, Friday, Oct. 3 at Mabuhay Gardens, 435 Broadway, San Francisco. Tickets ($23 including fees) and more info here.
